(3 min read.) Ok, here’s my real tea on the writer-reader relationship. I’ll give you four practical rules to write by at the end, but first I need to explain why they matter.
The Core Writer-Reader Relationship
Your reader owes you nothing and you owe them everything. That’s the basis of the contract. They can put your work down and walk away anytime they feel like it. If they stay, you owe them everything you’ve got. The best thing you can give a reader is the opportunity to FULLY ENGAGE. If you want to take good care of your reader, you can’t do everything for them. You need to let them work. Because for their tastes, they’re a better writer than you.
Your reader is a storytelling genius.
They’ll tell themselves the story better than you ever could. You pave the road, they drive the car. Don’t try to drive the car for them by forcing them to feel exactly how you feel about every detail of your narrative. Let them be smarter (and more creative) than you are.
It’s not that complicated. Just like how a guided journaling prompt brings ideas and feelings out of you, your published writing is a prompt that brings ideas and feelings out of the reader. But most writing advice kind of ignores this basic fact of how writing works.
So much writing advice is all about the WRITER. Forget (just for a moment) about artistic expression, self-revelation, vision, or the muse. Forget about the idea of writing as a finished product. Forget about “the writer” as a beacon of creativity.
The reader is the creative one; you just work here.
How does it feel to think of yourself as a facilitator? A helper? A technician who creates a simple one-touch button that readers push to unlock a feeling trapped inside themselves?
The writer starts the idea. The reader is the one who finishes it and gives it lasting power. It’s the simple truth of how writing works, but a lot of writing advice frankly ignores this and glorifies the writer instead. See if you can forget (just for a few moments!) about elevated concepts like your artistic expression and vision and having a brilliant voice and being in thrall to the muse, and all the rest of it. What’s left? The bare bones of what you do.
You arrange letters into words that suggest the reader might want to think about something.
A table.
An elephant.
Being a character with the courage to make huge mistakes with big consequences.
You don’t make the reader think or feel anything. You just suggest they might like to try. Then, they do ALL the real storytelling for themselves.
Four Rules for the Writer-Reader Relationship
If you see the reader as a storytelling genius and yourself as their assistant, how does that change your job as an author?
- Don’t make them agree with you. Don’t push them or force them to share your precise opinion about how an elephant should look, what a moment should feel like, or when to forgive a character who’s done wrong. Give them space to do some of the work themselves. If you’re constantly barking information at them, they won’t be able to feel the pulse of their own imaginative heartbeat. You probably do your most creative work when you have space to breathe. Your reader is the same. Let ’em breathe.
- Don’t waste their time. Say as little as you can and still get your point across. They have a lot of genius stuff to do today, so don’t waffle.
- Offer a gift they might like. It’s okay to see what people want and give it to them. Find the middle ground between what they love and what you do. Just like you probably wouldn’t accompany a best friend to go see a movie you know you’ll hate just because they’ll like it, when it comes to your readers, try to find something you’ll BOTH like.
- Be in awe of your fans. If they got that much out of what you made, it means they put so much of themselves into it. Check your ego, because it’s not about you.
You might disagree with me. That’s fine. The goal of this post isn’t to convince you. It’s to suggest that you might want to consider what really happens between a writer and reader. I think it’s something like the above.
If you find this approach to the writer-reader relationship helpful, you might like this simple editing tip.
xo, megan
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